Published as Neal’s Belch or Neal’s Issues circa 2005. Although I see I took the liberty of updating my age for a mid 2000s IYH Blog rehash. I won’t be doing that again.

You may be aware that recently I suffered an injury to my right forefinger, causing a bruise which has taken this past ten days to heal. I’m pleased to say that I am now on the mend, but my scrape with the wall did cause me to contemplate my mortality, or lack thereof. I have been alive now for almost thirty-six years, and therefore assume that I am immortal. However, it may be that my hand and legs are not. And apparently some people who lose limbs choose to hold a burial service for their lost body part. This of course is not to be confused with the phenomenon of dogs who try to bury a bone in the back garden, but instead end up burying one of their own lower legs.

Anyway, I’ve decided that if it ever turns out that I am not technically “immortal”, and I do die, I will get around this by holding a burial service for my body, as if it is simply a missing limb. I will then ignore the fact that I am dead, and carry on as normal, hoping nobody notices. If necessary, I will declare my departure in my tax returns. I am, after all, a law-abiding citizen, and will not under any circumstances seek to undermine the authority of the government in matters of the re-allocation of incomes towards state spending.

My only worry is that my body will decide that I am dead, and hold a burial service for me at the same time that I am holding a burial service for it. I suppose at least we could save money by having a double plot, and be buried side by side, but who then would carry on the important task of being Neal?

Perhaps Justin, my middle name, could take over. I’ve always thought he was a nice chap, and it really is time that he got some of the limelight. Incidentally, since when has lime been capable of emitting light? That’s the most stupid phrase I’ve ever heard, yet I continue to use it. I’m like a sheep that blindly follows the herd as they are rounded up and pushed through the gate by the three-legged dog that for some reason is carrying a bone and, rather appropriately, looking sheepish.

That reminds me. There are not enough webcomics about sheep in this world. Perhaps if I get time I will create Matchstick Sheep, but let’s assume for a moment that I don’t. What is going to become of our children, who are being raised on a diet of Battle of the Planets and Huckleberry Hound? Where are our city kids going to learn the ways of the farm? There are far too many children in my locality who go through school without learning how to milk a cow. What on earth are they going to do in the event of a dairy workers’ strike? Does nobody think about these things any more?

And while I’m on the subject, why does a pint of low fat milk take up exactly the same amount of space as a pint of regular milk? Surely if there is less fat in it there will be less of it. And why have the bottled water manufacturers so far failed to come up with a “diet” version of their beverage? Those of us who try to diet are constantly being told that we have to cut out fat and unhealthy stuff from our lives, and drink more water, but when we try to do so we are cut down from all directions, like a forest coming under attack from a sword-wielding newspaper proprietor who has run out of paper and needs to get his hands on some quickly.

And that reminds me. If something is fried in fat, and you eat the something but not the fat, isn’t that a fat-free meal? And what happens if you make sausages out of a nice part of the pig, rather than it’s stomach and urinary equipment? Are you still allowed to call them sausages, or would you be in contravention of European Union regulations regarding the naming of food items? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter since you would probably give them a more upmarket name, to avoid selling yourself short. I always try to avoid selling myself short. I’m five feet, ten and a half inches tall, you know, and proud of it. It took a lot of effort to grow this tall, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pretend to be shorter than I am, just for the sake of not looking greedy.

Furthermore, I’m hungry.

bout

Circa 2005

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every year of every decade of every century of every millennium of every age, can be measured using a wristwatch. 

But why bother?  They’re all pretty much the same length anyway.

When God divided the minutes into sixty seconds, he did one hell of a good job of distributing the lengths equally. That’s one thing you can say about the presiding deity in which much of the world’s population believes. He sure as hell gets the small things right.

You take flies for example. One less leg than they have, and they wouldn’t be able to stand up straight. Apparently he modelled them on Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous design for a helicopter.

Good for God. He clearly has plenty of drive and ambition.

Personally though, I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Expect not to reap what you sow, for arrogant is he (or she) who dares to expect the planned outcome, and saintly is he who acknowledges with humility and honesty that he will make a complete cat’s breakfast of it.”

Failure is a wonderful thing.

There is nothing I like better, for example, than to see a parachutist fail to land on a passing cirrocumulus cloud before it bursts open and soaks him, causing him to reach for his spare parachute to use as a makeshift anorak. This really is marvellous entertainment, and I am surprised, if not a little outraged, that it has not been made into some sort of situation comedy by the BBC. (At time of writing Irish television does not make successful or watrchable sit-coms)

I’ve always been surprised at how little we make use of clouds. Nowadays the weather can be controlled for short distances, and surely it is not beyond the reach of the experts to manufacture a cloud that is strong and thick enough to hold a plane as it refuels mid-air, thereby reducing traffic congestion at airports.

Scientists are pretty useless when it comes to finding practical uses to which to put their genius. They’re all obsessed with studying tiny organisms who we’ll never meet in our day to day lives, and sending puppies to the moon to check the best-before date of the cheese.

It seem to me that young people are turning away from science and looking towards something else, and as we drift further into the first century of this, the third millennium, (unless of course there were more millennia before those and we just hadn’t developed the intelligence to count them yet – which seems unlikely) it would appear that our young people have adopted a new kind of faith which, happily, is now guiding them towards a more fulfilled and complete existence on this Earth.

The Nike “swoosh”, that wonderfully positive tick sign is now emblazoned on the outer garments of the top ten per cent of our young people whom the company endorses.

Those lucky enough to qualify for this awards scheme get to bear the symbol proudly on their anorak, leg-trouser or even running shoe, thereby indicating to the world that they are legitimate members of our community, and not to be messed with under any circumstances up to and including nuclear holocaust, the death of a pope (as proved recently) and the cancellation of Music Television’s “Pimp my Ride”.

This website’s proprietor alas, is not one of the chosen, and goes about dressed in drab chinos and polo shirts, head hung in shame as he parades his pathetic self down the high street of his town. One of course lives in hope of some day getting to hold against the skin the textilic trophy of recognition, as produced by some equally blessed eight year old at some elite and hidden factory in Thailand or some such place: a sweat shop paralleled only by that of Willy Wonka himself.

Not to be pedantic, but perhaps the whole debate about low cost outsourcing would be a little less confusing if the premises involved were not called “sweat shops”. Surely the stores in which these items of confectionery are sold, are the ones who should use that title. The place of manufacture should obviously be labelled “sweat factory”.

It is this abuse of the English language that is making the world a worse place to live. My mother’s home town has recently been populated with a selection of sponsored street furniture, all of which bears the company name “Street Bench’s Ltd.” or some such thing. This flagrant misplacing of a possessive apostrophe is nothing short of pure evil, and this website will stop at nothing to wipe it out. Just yesterday myself and Joanne sat on one of these seats while waiting for a bus and now, just twenty four hours later, we are suffering from tiredness, a common cold or possibly leperacy. Not being a medical expert myself, I do not feel qualified to make a specific diagnosis.

Nor should you.

This sort of thing must be left to the professionals who have devoted so many years of their lives to attending lectures with heavy hangovers and writing letters to the newspapers about the preponderment of robins spiting out their worms halfway through their meals due to the deterioration in taste of the current harvest of crawling insects.

Personally, I don’t worry about that sort of thing too much. As far as I’m concerned, once half the worm gets half eaten, there’s one less worm in the world to bother me.

And christ do they bother me.

Those bastards are just like miniature snakes, except of course that they have lower standards of hygiene and instead of slipping their skin every now and then, they are happy to go about baked in mud.

Not that there’s anything wrong with mud, you understand. I myself am perfectly happy to walk in mud whenever the mood takes me. But I’m designed for that. I have legs and feet and shoes, unlike the humble worm who just slides about naked in it and gets it all over him or her self.

Perhaps mud is the Nike “swoosh” of the worm world, where young worms feel the need to cover themselves in the latest batch of fashionable sewage in order to fit in with their cohorts. In fact, I seem to remember that there was a band called “Mud” in the nineteen seventies, who were very popular with the young people. I assume that is where it all derived from.

But then I also assume that moon is made of cheese. Having never travelled to the lunar satellite, I must base my understanding of it’s makeup on all that I have read about it. A couple of pages in an encyclopaedia about the moon landing, and several dozen nursery rhymes. Like this one for example –

Half past noon
Let’s go to the moon
And visit the pink baboon

He’ll welcome us soon
And lend us a spoon
And we’ll sample the cheddar moon

We’ll try out the cheddar
And it will taste bedder
Than anything we’ve ever seen

So we’ll gobble it all
And after we’ll fall
In love with the cheese on the moon

And if we’ve got room
After eating the moon
The baboon will make us some tea

He’ll be all smiles
Visible for miles
Then he’ll eat us

– That sort of thing. Anyway, where was I?

More fine poetry here

First published as a MatchstickCats.com Editorial, circa 2005. A glorious era when this site had several regular columnists whose spelling I was very good at correcting, so I gave myself a promotion.

It’s always been a good idea to live by a motto, and what better phrase to live by but “Quid illyas manholia actuality”, which of course means “An electric eel can easily be adapted for foreign travel with the help of a lightweight converter plug”. But of course, life is never as simple as that, is it? For a start, you cannot put electric sea creatures into water. You’ll get electrocuted, and at best cause the warranty to become void.

There was a time, back in the early nineteen eighties, when the only thing we had to worry about was finding some way to harvest the sweat water running off our backs, so that we wouldn’t be accused of wastage when it flowed onto the ground while we were working. In the end, somebody developed drainpipe trousers, and that was another of life’s problems over with, done and dusted, all sorted out by technology.

On the other hand, nobody has as yet managed to find a cure for the summertime blues, over thirty years after the sadly deceased Eddie Cochrane brought the issue to the attention of the record buying public. Perhaps he should have chosen his audience more wisely. Scientists and inventors rarely have time to listen to pop music, with the obvious exception of Trevor Bailiff, inventor of the clockwork radio. I believe at the moment he’s busy working on a clock that’s powered by radio waves.

This is very worrying. We have had enough problems recently with sea waves that tragically ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The last thing we need is this asshole harvesting audio waves and making them bigger.

We here at MatchstickCats.com urge you to boycott the radio wave powered clock, the minute it comes out.

Remember the solar eclipse of the nineteen eighties? When the whole moon was blocked by the sun for ten minutes? Mercifully the moon managed to move out of it’s shadow, but next time we might not be so lucky. It is obviously no coincidence that this happened just as solar powered calculators were becoming fashionable. Let’s put a stop to this crap right now, before it gets out of hand.

Neal’s Belch no. 195 for 12th Mar, 2005

I’ve always held a strong objection to the amount of wastage involved in the spelling of the word “queue” That said, it is, I must admit, rather attractive when seen in it’s written form, and I have spent many a rainy day writing it down for future generations to enjoy millennia from now, long after those of us who are intelligent enough to recognise it’s subtle beauties, have perished, and the entity that you have come to know as “Neal’s Belch”, is long forgotten.

Another word of which I am undeniably fond is paraquat.

I am unsure as to it’s meaning but I am led to understand that it’s use is of a horticultural nature. This is unfortunate, since horticultural is an ugly and unpleasant word. Ironically, it also reminds me of pigs, which are non-horticultural. Not that I have anything against pigs, you understand.

It’s just that they are disgusting, vile creatures who bathe in their own vomit and kill small children. Where I come from, that sort of thing is frowned upon. Nevertheless, I am prepared to tolerate the presence of pigs within our society, provided that they are pigs in the privacy of their own homes and don’t harm anyone else with their foul and unnatural deviation from the norm. For example, they must ensure that their use of towels in public lavatories does not result in a risk to public health.

I’ve always had a greater than average amount of trouble with drying my hands in public lavatories. Perhaps it is something to do with my waste obsession. I never like to hit the button on the hand dryer a second time if I’m not completely dry yet, as I end up using only half of the second cycle, then walking away, leaving at least three cubic milicentres of hot hair air to blow into the Ethernet, never to be used by anyone except perhaps a passing firefly who needs a top-up.

I have the same problem with towels.

I’m only going to use about two feet of the cloth, and leave the rest of the roll (around fifty feet) untouched, so there seems little point in causing a whole role to be sent to the laundry just so that I can selfishly dry my hands and go away looking all content, like a cheese obsessive who’s just won a trip to the moon and who is under the misapprehension that it is made of cheese, and is also under the mistaken belief than he can eat the ground beneath his feet, under zero gravity, zero atmosphere conditions, without any serious consequences for his safety and well being.

That said, I’ve always wanted to live in zero gravity conditions. What with ground rents being so high here in Ireland , and the sheer amount of empty space that seems to be available above us, it makes sense from a purely logical point of view.

Also it looked cool in that dream I had last night. Which reminds me, I wrote a poem. Some time ago. I can’t remember what it was about or anything but it was an enriching experience and I would highly recommend it to those of you who are as talented as me. Those of you who are not, should consider a career in carpentry.

With a bit of luck and God on your side, you’ll turn out to be the second coming of Christ, which hopefully is not quite as vulgar as the phrase appears to suggest. Of course, there was no censorship in the days when the Bible was written, so you could get away with that sort of stuff, so long as you wrote it carefully and neatly on expensive parchment in fancy writing, such as Times Roman Numeral. After all, appearance is everything when most of the world have not yet learned to read.

Personally, although I consider myself a practicing Christian, I have never been a great believer in the whole Christ / going to church / believing in god / loving thy neighbour / being good / not killing people / trying to leave this world a better place than it was when you came into it, thing.

It just all seems a little far fetched for me, and I find that the only things I need to live my life are Santa Claus and the Internet, that wonderful technology which for the last seventeen months has allowed me to bring my thoughts to, at it’s peak, an audience of five people per week.

Internet, of course, is short for International Network, a phrase meaning an interconnected system of nets which can catch radio waves and convert them into web pages, just like this one, visible to the naked eye, if not those which are partially dressed. I still remember with fondness my first night at Web Design class, where I was introduced to the wonders of HTML coding and how to deal with stalkers who would stop at nothing to get into your computer and draw a silly moustache on your photo on the Writers’ page. Thankfully, none of this happened to me, and besides I’ve seen several episodes of Matlock, and therefore have an intimate knowledge of the legal framework involved.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of the cats is Jewish, but to avoid stereotyping he portrays an atheist cat. The other (female) cat is Woody Allen in drag, and not two minutes into the scene he realises that it is extremely difficult to balance one’s glasses on a cat’s nose. He fears that he will look like one of those scary middle aged men who always come into your workplace as customers, with their glasses slid right down to the bottom of their noses, so that they can peer at you over the frames in an intimidating authoritative fashion.

So he decides to hand the role over to Leonardo DeCaprio. This despite his being thirty years younger than the cat who he is supposed to play.

In the midst of all of this hullabaloo, it never occurs to anyone to point out that the other cat is a Siamese, and could play both characters if anyone thought to ask one or both of his heads.

And therein, as always, lies a lesson.

Anyway, another two cats walk into another bar. Why the hell not. One of the cats is actually a pig dressed as a cat, and the other is a cat dressed as a pig dressed as a cat. This leads to terrible confusion for the bartender, who is prejudiced against pigs. In the ends, both cats are asked to remove their clothing. They both do so, for the hell of it, and the first cat’s true identity as a pig is revealed.

However the second cat, who you’ll remember is a cat dressed as a pig dressed as a cat, just removes his outer cat disguise, revealing his fake pig identity.

of the cats get removed from the bar, and the police are called. Just as they arrive, the second cats shouts “Who the hell called the pigs?”, and it becomes obvious that he is really a cat dressed as a pig (and previously a cat dressed as a pig dressed as a cat). Luckily, the cops turn out to be cats dresses up as policemen / pigs, and they all have a good laugh about it in the end, with the exception of the bartender who is prosecuted under section seven, subsection two of the Discrimination Act,1955.

And quite rightly too. There’s far too much of that sort of thing going on, if you ask me.

Archival Note: This was the final Neal’s Belch. Shortly after a completely different and unrelated series began, called Neal’s Issues, as well as another callecd MatchstickCats.com Editorials.

Circa 2005

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Quad arisces domitorium”, which of course means “Ask not what your hamster ca –

– No I haven’t. That’s ridiculous. I can’t do this anymore.

This constant stream of lies, for no other reason than to fill a screen with nonsensical ramblings about cats and turnips and other such entities which deserve to be treated much more seriously than this.

For the past twenty months I have abused you, dear reader, by fobbing you off with absolute carp. And as a result you are left to pick up the pieces and go about your daily life armed with false information and made-up anecdotes that not only waste your time, they may even lead you into danger. I am truly sorry.

Let me try to make some small gesture towards rectifying the situation by telling you something, for a change, that is true and that will help you, rather than hinder you, in your attempt to get through your miserable existence.

Where I work, in a large office building in the centre of Dublin city, Ireland, there is a window behind me which faces onto the back of a well known, upmarket hotel.

And the hotel is undergoing major renovations that are expected to last a year or two, hence being closed for business at the moment. As a result tourists, unable to find any suitably high standard accommodation nearby, have taken to sleeping in the little alcoves that frame our office’s windows, all of which by the way are kept clean by the office cat, who licks each pane of glass thoroughly over a continuous two week cy –

– Never mind. Anyway, the building work at the hotel gets pretty noisy, and it’s hard to hear yourself think sometimes. Just yesterday I was thinking about the fact that there are seahorses, sea lions and sea fishes, but no sea cats, and I came up with a brilliant solution but I can’t for the life of me tell you what it is, because just as I was thinking it, my idea was drowned out by another blast of drilling from next door.

Where is this going? You may well ask. Frankly, I make this up as I go along and have no idea. On top of that I’m a little short of ideas at the moment, so don’t be surprised if the rest of this is just filler. Monkey one, monkey two, monkey three, peanut time. Full stop. Dot. Dot. Tod. Todd. That’s how you come up with a boy’s name. Now, for girls, it’s a little different. Trill, tril, lirt, flirt, skirt, brown, Hazel.

As if writer’s block isn’t enough (and frankly it isn’t, if I’m only going to be able to get six words out of discussing it), I also have an obscure Tom Petty song going round in my head, and I’m humming along with it, and that’s not helping my sore ear. Not that I would expect it to.

In case you’re wondering, it’s the one from the Full Moon Fever album that goes “but I’ll probably feel a little bit better when you’re gone”. Have you noticed that the young people nowadays always spell “you’re” as “your”? Me neither. But apparently the part of my brain that types, has.

What else? I’ve been eating a lot of spinach lately, as part of a calorie controlled diet of course, and oddly enough it goes beautifully with that dried pasta that comes in a bag with the sauces already in it. I’m also consuming copious quantities of fruit. So much of it in fact that –

Sorry, had to go out for a minute. Anyway, pasta is of course an anagram of “pasat”, which I believe is a misspelling of a model of car produced by Nissan. Now, oddly enough Nissan used to be called Datsun, and if you re-arrange the letters of the company’s old name, you get “A sun”, but you have a couple of letter left over if you do that. And if there’s one thing the motor industry can’t be doing with, it’s wastage.

That’s why they avoided pursuing “A sun” as a possible fuel source for modern vehicles, steering well away from the idea of solar cars. Thee had realised, using nothing but a clever analysis of the English language, that solar power always leaves waste. After all, do we really want to be here in twenty years time trying to figure out what to do with the copious amounts of unused sunlight that is being dumped at the sides of Oasises in the Sahara Desert, and other such places?

Okay I’m done. Sorry.

From Spring 2005, a “MatchstickCats.com Editorial”

Many years have passed since Ronald Reagan stood on the steps of the library in Dallas, Texas , U.S.A, North America and said “Godammit how the hell could he have done it from that angle?”. And still the mystery of JFK’s death goes ignored and it is assumed by all who get listened to, that whathisname who later got shot did it.

Now, I don’t really care about any of that, but it strikes me that public libraries are far from the wonderful places thaT they could be.

In my youth, a library was a place to which you rode your pedal cycle on a Saturday morning, books strapped carefully to your back carrier, and spent hours and hours joyfully browsing the magical scripts within. Nowadays, they are full of computers and videos and lavatories and smartcards and all sorts of modern and hideous apparatus.

If you tried to shoot somebody from a library nowadays, you would no doubt get caught on web cam by some geek who is busy talking online with a friend at the other side of the world who has the same interests. A love of cheese, perhaps. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m sure President Kennedy might have been with us to this very day, had his alleged assassin been instilled by his parents with a healthy interest in dairy by-products of one kind or another, rather than an uncontrollable tendency to get caught up in alleged conspiracies and / or assassinations and things.

But the point is, it is assumed that something old cannot be made interesting unless it is replaced with something new.

It has never occurred to anyone that instead of replacing the book with something modern and fancy like an electro-book that they put on their i-pod, or whatever the hell they do nowadays, you could instead write a more contemporary book that is relevant to the people who you hope will read it.

“The Cat in the Hat”, for example, should be rewritten in the light of the changes to pet owning fashions that happened after the release of the movie Babe, and should feature a pig in a baseball hat, wearing sports garments and footwear that were made in some far flung hellhole by factory workers who are approximately the same age as the reader.

Or it could at least feature a more modern hat.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I could open up another window here and look at porn sites for a while, and if someone comes into the room I just flick back to that nerdy site with all the articles, and they’re none the wiser.

And you’d be largely right about that. But the point is, any cat that is presented to our young people as a piece that aspires to become popular culture, must be adapted to the fashions of the time. Otherwise the youth of today will just cower in fear behind their hideous home entertainment apparatus and perspiration-soaked running shoes made, rather ironically if you ask me, in sweat shop factories. Just like the one in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, although that was set in the United States , where it’s called candy instead of sweets for some reason. (2024 note: It was not set in the United States, you idiot)

And there were no cats in either the book or the original film adaptation, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” starring Gene Wilder and that kid who grew up to be, rather ironically I thought given the involvement of teeth-rotting sweets, a dentist. I’m afraid I have not seen the new version, as it has only just been released here, so I cannot vouch for it’s cat contents, or lack thereof. Furthermore, I hear that a newly-found extra chapter of the book has just been published to raise money for charity, and based on my limited information I must assume, until I know better, that there is a fifty: fifty chance of there being a cat in it.

Furthermore, it was with amazement in their eyes that my audience in a local pub a couple of weeks ago heard me reply that I have never seen the movie “Pretty Woman”. I added, although not with any particular relevance to the conversation, that I have also never seen “Bambi”. I will of course keep my eyes peeled in case he turns up though. I’m sure his mom misses him.

From 2005 or thereabouts, probably.

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Esq quilillias acrobat agraphobius”, which of course means “There isn’t enough room in here to swing a cat, and if there was, I would not do so anyway, as I feel it would compromise my position as chairperson of the National Campaign against Catswinging.

Unless of course the room was in another nation. In which case, let’s party. I’ve got some Rice Krispie buns and a bottle of fizzy orange in the fridge”

And this brings me to my point. The number of chemicals that are put into oranges and other fruit these days to make them fizzy is an absolute disgrace.

For one thing, it is thirteen, which everybody knows is an unlucky number and should never be used under any circumstance. For another, it is not divisible by any other number that I know of, unless you’re prepared to lower yourself to the standards of those who would fractionise. I will assume that you are not. Therefore the number thirteen cannot be manipulated mathematically in any way should the need arrive, and if it does, a new number will have to be purchased at great expense.

But apart from that, all over the world monkeys are becoming seriously ill after eating these so-called fizzy oranges, soft-drink-ready lemons and carbonated bananas. And I for one say that it has to stop. Not least because it doesn’t happen, and the phenomenon is nothing more than a weird thought going round in my head like a moth going around dangerously close toyour open mouth at night.

As it happens, I always keep my bedroom brightly lit at night, to keep the bogeyman out. The bogeyman has very sensitive eyes, and cannot stand bright lights, so as a sign of goodwill I leave a jar of soothing eye cream for him at the exit.

I have never hard of eye-cream, and suspect that there may be no such thing, yet somehow I feel it is perfectly legitimate to make references to it in this piece of online journalism. Perhaps it is because I’m hungry, and would quite like some eye cream at the moment. I’m not sure.

I seem to remember the old silent movies had a lot of custard pies, which, strangely enough, were white not yellow, and people used to throw them at each other and it would land all over their faces, including their eyes. Perhaps this is what I mean by eye cream. I don’t know.

Or perhaps it is a simple and rather stupid misspelling of “I Cream”, a little used abbreviation of ice cream. Or perhaps my inner voice is trying to tell me something: “I scream”. A cry of hidden torment and discontentment.

Whatever the answer, I don’t really care.